| Some psycholinguistic experiments in English have supported the modularity theory by showing that semantic-category information cannot be used predictively to guide on-line sentence comprehension. These psycholinguistic experiments in English have shown that comprehenders are guided by purely structural information during on-line sentence comprehension.; This position has been criticized by the Interactionists, mainly on the basis that, in English, the stronger Subject-Verb-Object word order constraint overpowers the weaker semantic constraint. In this dissertation we wanted to evaluate whether semantic category-information guides on-line sentence comprehension in Italian--a language, according to the Interactionists, in which the semantic cues are purported to be stronger than syntactic cues.; In our first experiment, in line with the Verb Phrase Principle, we set out to test the modular hypothesis that, in Italian, only the structural information associated with different verb types would guide the on-line processing of a sentence. The findings of this experiment showed that although Italians are very sensitive to semantic-category information during the on-line sentence processing, they use semantic-category information in a different way than that predicted by the Interactionists.; We conducted a second experiment to see whether we could replicate the findings of Experiment 1, using a different set of language materials, occurring in a different syntactic sentential configuration. The findings of Experiment 2, again, challenged both the modularity and the interactionist theories, and substantiated the findings of Experiment 1.; What these findings suggested was that Italian comprehenders, given a particular syntactic configuration, use information about the location of the semantic-category information to determine the type of parsing strategy to pursue. That is, depending on where this information occurs in the sentence, it may function either as a "syntactic trigger" that initiates the construction of tentative syntactic representations, or it may function as a "syntactic trigger" which helps the comprehender select the most appropriate syntactic representation. |
